In his link curation, Drudge tends to favor juicy Politico scoops and stories about the vicissitudes of the New York Times, so this is a fat hanging curveball over the middle of the plate for his purposes. It also happens to be the truth, says Capital co-founder Tom McGeveran.

If that sounds audacious, consider Politico's history. Its co-founders, Jim VandeHei and John Harris, were journalists at the Washington Post when they came up with the idea for a website that would cover politics in a more granular and higher-octane way than their staid paper could. When the Post failed to get behind them, they took their idea to Allbritton, and then spent the next six years (and counting) showing their former employer what a digital news strategy looks like. Rare is the story about the decline of the Post's fortunes under the Graham family that doesn't include a mention of the missed opportunity.

But disruption doesn't mean demolition. McGeveran, who spent nearly a decade at the New York Observer and eight months as its top editor, says he's not looking to put the Times out of business. "We love the Times. We're never going to make the Times disappear," he says. "The people who read the Times are the kind of sophisticated readers we need to push our analysis of what's happening in New York. There's a kind of synergy there."

New York is also a more complicated market to dominate than Washington, where politics is the only industry that matters to anyone from outside the city limits. "If Washington is a company town, then New York is few company towns that make up a palimpsest," McGeveran says. A handful of the two dozen new staffers that he and his co-founder, Josh Benson, will hire with Allbritton's money will be tasked to the media beat, the main pillar -- along with finance and fashion -- of New York's business life.

In some ways, Capital is an unlikely candidate to become New York's answer to Politico. Compared with its new sister site, Capital is considerably more evenhanded and perspicacious, less excitable and sensational. Some of that difference in character, however, was a matter of necessity, Capital not having had the bodies to pursue a high-metabolism strategy of breaking news daily. "I think we're going to get more like Politico because we just would be more like Politico if we had more staff," says McGeveran.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of congruence on the business side, with Capital, like Politico, deriving much of its ad revenue from advocacy groups and local political campaigns. That similarity made Allbritton a better fit than other potential buyers or backers Capital talked to, whom McGeveran declined to name. "We could’ve just taken on another round of investment," he added, "but then it would still be up to us to work out the theory ourselves that Politico has already worked out in practice."